Lisa Higgs

Lisa Higgs’ second chapbook Unintentional Guide to the Big City was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in April 2015. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards. Currently, Lisa is the Poetry Editor for Quiddity.

After reading Tracy K. Smith If not a vessel, a purse to hold the necessary scatterings and ticket stubs that show we prefer each other’s company when lights dim and sentiment is projected to the far walls. More sturdy than tissues, comforting than a cough drop. The bandage for paper cuts. If not the… Read more →

She loved a man who loved words as competition, tiled board games given expedience electronically, so many ways to play the order of letters out each evening while screen noise projects its shows and sirens, its men flanked by beauty as bodies, the female form a dressing. So few ways to say each word in a sentence and mean happiness,… Read more →

if a house if a house on a hill near trees and lake if the lake, if trees if a house on the lake, brown, sullen, the overthrown river bloated in boats, treated to feed a water’s need in creation, if a house up the slope, stares down to edge agape if a house, if the lake so many mouths… Read more →

“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride and wisdom!” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Perhaps Shelley’s doctor had the right of it: lightening animates the dead, opening lungs to air, if such flow is signature of life. Inhale, and oxygen’s own desire to pair suggests a weaving, this thin trail of atoms recombinant not of self, but of… Read more →